Column #20 - If you don’t really think it’s “chic”, I won’t tell anyone

We can distinguish pearl from ivory from eggshell, but must everything else be “chic”? Either we’ve reached a remarkable standard of civilisation, or somebody isn’t doing their job.

Say “chic” thirty times. By the twentieth, it sounds fairly ridiculous; by the thirtieth, it means nothing at all. After years of “chic” hotels, “chic” handbags and “chic” dinners, eating butter is now “chic”. So is reading, walking in the sun, and occasionally putting one’s phone down. The word still appears everywhere: meaning, however, has become rather harder to locate. This is all very charming, but it is also what happens when a useful word becomes a content strategy. Fashion has always depended on vocabulary. Clothes exist, of course, but is fashion beginning to exist only when somebody explains what they mean? 

Roland Barthes devoted an entire book, “The Fashion System”, to this distinction. Rather than just describing garments, the fashion press gives them social meaning. A skirt becomes “severe”, a coat “bourgeois”, or a shoe “wrong”. The adjective tells the reader not only what she is looking at, but how to understand the person wearing it. Words therefore matter rather more than the average brand caption suggests. Yet, fashion marketing currently treats them as interchangeable decorations. Everything is “iconic, timeless, elevated, effortless”, or, when inspiration is running out, “chic”. 

Veni, vidi, vaguely

Linguists have a term for this process: semantic bleaching. Through repetition, a word loses the precise force it once carried and acquires a broader, weaker meaning. “Awesome” used to inspire awe. “Terribly” once involved terror. “Literally” now frequently announces that something did not literally happen. And then the internet became involved. “Iconic” moved from Audrey Hepburn’s Givenchy dress to a celebrity’s airport outfit and then to somebody’s scrambled eggs. Yet repetition alone cannot explain the problem. A prayer repeated every day may become more meaningful, not less. “I love you” has survived considerable exposure, several marriages and most French films. The real question is not simply how often a word gets said, but whether the person saying it has made a decision.

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Saussure argued that words acquire value through their differences from neighbouring words. If chic can replace all its neighbours, those differences disappear. Five distinct judgements become one general compliment. The word no longer tells us that something is; it tells us that the speaker would like to be seen near it. And if chic now means “I approve”, why not simply say so? What does it tell us about butter that butter had not already made abundantly clear?

This loss of precision reflects a broader discomfort with taste itself. Taste requires selection. To call one thing chic should imply that another thing is not. This is inconvenient online, where every preference must be personal, valid and preferably available through an affiliate link. Contemporary culture wants everyone to possess taste, provided nobody uses it to make an unfavourable distinction. Brands have understood the terms perfectly. A 2023 study on influencers and luxury labels found that humblebragging produced more envy and less trust than direct boasting. Consumers, as it turns out, do not necessarily resent aspirations. A $3 000 handbag does not need to discuss community, personal growth or the beauty of ordinary rituals. It can simply be beautiful, desirable and $3 000.

The word “luxury” has already suffered the same enthusiastic treatment. Once it began describing apartments, candles, taxis and yogurt, marketers introduced “premium”, “prestige”, “prime”, “super-prime” and eventually “masstige”. The last combines mass and prestige, allowing everyone to enjoy exclusivity together. This constant search for a stronger substitute reveals the problem rather neatly: when every brand claims distinction in the same language, the language can no longer distinguish the brands. Even trademark law understands this. Aspirin, Escalator and Thermos became so widely used in the United States that they stopped identifying one company and became ordinary names for entire categories. Their owners achieved universal recognition and lost exclusive rights. Success can be wonderfully ungrateful. 

Thus spoke Zara

The obvious conclusion would be that chic has been ruined. Confucius might have agreed; he believed that names must correspond properly to realities because, when words stop identifying things accurately, judgement becomes unreliable. He would presumably object to a civilization in which the same adjective describes Catherine Deneuve or a hotel bathroom. Wittgenstein offers a more irritating possibility. For him, a word has no permanent inner meaning waiting to be protected by a fashion editor. Meaning comes from use; if millions of people call reading outside chic, then reading outside has become one of the things chic can mean. 

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The “kinda chic” trend has therefore not simply emptied the word; it has changed what people accomplish by using it. Chic traditionally evaluated an object or person. Online, it increasingly signals recognition between people. Calling a solitary walk chic does not seriously assess the quality of the walk; it tells a stranger that you share an attitude towards walking, solitude, and probably wired headphones. The word has moved from judgment to belonging, and belonging naturally requires less precision. It works best when many people qualify. Taste becomes interesting precisely when some things do not. Still, the new use is not entirely foolish. Finding pleasure in reading, walking, or putting one’s phone away offers a welcome alternative to constructing a personality through purchases. The internet has spent years telling women which objects will finally make them interesting. It has now discovered activities that are free. Marketing is taking the news bravely.